सुप्रोवा सरकार

Suprova Sarkar (born Suprabha Ghosh on 25 September 1919; also credited as Suprabha or Suprava Sarkar) was a singer who became one of the most sought-after playback voices of Bengali cinema through the 1940s and 1950s. The daughter of music enthusiasts Upendranath Ghosh and Champaknalini, she began singing professionally at around age thirteen, trained under Dhrupadia Shishir Guha and Tarapada Chakraborty, and made her radio debut on All India Radio Calcutta's Galpadadur Asar before becoming a regular voice on the station's annual Mahishasuramardini broadcast. Her first gramophone record was cut in 1936 for the Senola Musical Products Company, and she went on to record extensively for HMV, Hindusthan Musical Products and Megaphone. Working within Calcutta's New Theatres-centred studio circle, her voice featured in films including Shuktara (1940), Ahuti (1941), Rajnartaki (1941), Pather Sathi (1946), Swapna O Sadhana (1947), Sharey Chuattar (1953) and Ma (1956), and she collaborated with poet Kazi Nazrul Islam around 1939 on devotional compositions. She married advocate Sudhir Chandra Sarkar in 1942, after which her work was credited to the name Suprabha Sarkar. Calcutta studios of this period regularly produced parallel Hindi versions of their Bengali films, consistent with the small number of Hindi-language song credits recorded under her name from these same years, though a detailed Hindi discography is not as well documented as her Bengali catalogue. She later taught Nazrul Geeti at Rabindra Bharati University and Surtirtha Sangeet Bidyalay and remained associated with All India Radio as a Nazrul-song trainer. She died on 23 September 1989.